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KLAS: Health data sharing improves, yet interoperability still lacking
KLAS' EHR Interoperability Overview 2025 highlights three areas in which challenges are holding back data sharing in healthcare.
Although EHR interoperability could boost innovation and ease patient care decisions for physicians as well as reduce administrative churn, a lack of collaboration between healthcare organizations, vendors and payers is holding back further interoperability, according to a new report by KLAS Research.
In an accompanying blog post, Tyson Blauer, insights director at KLAS and co-author of the report, stressed how teamwork is essential for interoperability.
"No single healthcare organization, vendor, or payer can solve interoperability challenges alone," Blauer wrote in the blog post. "Progress depends on shared terminology, shared expectations and shared accountability."
The KLAS report examined three use cases for interoperability: provider-to-provider patient record sharing, third-party application data sharing and payer-to-provider patient record sharing. To produce its insights, KLAS used data from previous reports, including Arch Collaborative data, as well as vendor-reported information.
Provider-to-provider patient record sharing
KLAS says "provider-to-provider patient record sharing" refers to the ability to make patient data sent and received from external sources usable and actionable in EHRs.
Clinicians encounter duplicate records and information that's inconsistently formatted and poorly mapped, according to the report. To improve interoperability, healthcare organizations must normalize data, reduce data duplication and align workflows, Blauer wrote.
The KLAS interoperability overview report cited data from the "Arch Collaborative EHR Interoperability 2024" report, which showed 49% of clinicians had "expected external integration" of EHRs compared with 46% in 2023 and 45% in 2018.
Although the healthcare industry must improve interoperability, vendors have boosted data sharing by supporting networks and frameworks such as CommonWell, Carequality and Qualified Health Information Networks (QHINs), Blauer wrote.
Third-party application data sharing
Third-party application data sharing refers to third-party applications sending and receiving data from patient records.
The KLAS report noted that although EHR vendors offer an increasing number of application programming interfaces (APIs) to connect third-party applications, they do not make healthcare organizations confident in data integration.
"Currently, different vendors take different approaches to APIs -- some use multiple to perform a task, while others use a single API," Blauer wrote in his post. "Healthcare organizations need vendors to work together to standardize interoperability methods and approach things in the same way."
Many vendors support FHIR R4 for interoperability; however, tech companies need to improve data sharing capabilities to accommodate the breadth of data that healthcare organizations require.
Still, FHIR APIs are likely to be the "future of third-party interoperability," Blauer said.
On a scale of 1 to 9, Epic received a score of 8.0 for its support of integration goals. Athenahealth's athenaClinicals followed Epic with a score of 7.7, and Meditech and NextGen Healthcare's Enterprise EHR tied at 6.9.
Payer-to-provider patient record sharing
Payer-to-provider patient record sharing consists of automating record exchanges between payers and healthcare organizations to allow payments to be processed.
A lack of trust between payers and healthcare organizations hampers data sharing, and interoperability challenges have caused inefficiencies in administrative processes, KLAS noted.
The research firm cited data from the KLAS Points of Light 2025 Report, in which 96% of payers and providers highlighted a need to build trust and partnership, compared with 48% that emphasized the need for strong technology.
Payers and providers must strengthen their relationships to enable more efficient data sharing, Blauer noted in his post.
CMS mandates such as the CMS Interoperability and Prior Authorization Final Rule (CMS-0057-F) and recent federal regulations could improve data sharing between payers and providers, KLAS noted. CMS-0057-F calls for improving healthcare information exchange so patients, healthcare providers and payers can receive the EHR access they need. It also discusses the need to improve prior authorization processes.
Payers must implement some provisions of CMS-0057-F by Jan. 1, 2026, but they have until Jan. 1, 2027, to satisfy requirements around APIs.
KLAS plans to expand on this report with separate studies on the three interoperability use cases.
Brian T. Horowitz started covering health IT news in 2010 and the tech beat overall in 1996.
